The feud that helped knock the shine off a Republican golden boy

July 08, 2013

January 05, 2011

My latest column for Kaiser Health News:
I respect honest disagreements about policy. You think health care reform is a bad idea? That it will run up the deficit or make it harder to find a doctor? I think you're wrong, but that's a reasonable debate and I'm happy to have it, just as long as you're truthful about what you are arguing and make some good faith effort to learn the facts.
Often, though, the noisiest voices in the health care reform debate don't do those things. They see a headline, figure out its political utility and use it to score cheap points.

October 06, 2010

Per Think Progress, two Republican Senate candidates, David Vitter and Sharron Angle, are using this image in political advertisements to depict illegal aliens:
What I can't help wondering is, who are these guys? I doubt they're actually illegal aliens, because then of course the ad-maker who's decrying illegal immigration would also be using illegal immigrants. It's pretty clearly a staged photo. Don't you wonder what the models were told? "Okay, the pose is good -- You in the middle, maybe turn that baseball cap around? Good!

July 16, 2010

Good Citizen of the Week: Dave Rauschkolb
A little over two weeks ago, on the very first post for this blog, I wrote about the discouraging politics of climate. The largest environmental disaster in the nation's history was unfolding, but a serious and focused grassroots push for legislation hadn't materialized. To back up my argument, I said, among other things, that a protest called "Hands Across the Sand"--in which environment
al activists literally held hands on beachfronts, to protest offshore drilling--had attracted only a few thousand people across the country.

July 14, 2010

The logic behind a moratorium on deepwater drilling seems sound enough. Until we have a better idea of exactly why Deepwater Horizon blew up and gushed millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf—and what other risks are still lurking out there—it's probably not a good idea to go ahead with a whole bunch of new insanely complex projects. Right? At least, that's what the Obama administration is thinking. Last month, it proposed a six-month halt on drilling that would affect 33 rigs under construction.